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Call for Papers: English Department Symposium, University of Alabama (September 8-10, 2022)
Drawing on the ASA conference theme “The Roof is on Fire,” this session invokes the phenomenon of book burnings to launch a broader conversation about the politicization of children’s media and the category of childhood itself — especially in debates about what materials children can and cannot encounter in domestic, institutional, and public spaces. For example, how is childhood being deployed in the targeted disinformation campaigns over Critical Race Theory?
The Creative Fiction section of the Popular Culture Association invites 15-20 minute fiction pieces for the upcoming annual PCA/ACA national conference. Submit to pcaaca.org. Work can only be accepted at PCA’s official submission site. Include both an abstract and the full piece to be presented.
We welcome stories in almost any style, although the maximum reading time is 18 minutes. We also welcome full panels of readers. We do not accept undergraduate submissions.
Deadline for submissions is December 5, 2021.
Please direct all inquiries to Dr. William L. Belford, Jr. at wbelford@georgiasouthern.edu.
Seeking contributors for a 3-4 person panel on "Plague Years: Pandemic and Pestilence in the Long Eighteenth Century."
(une version française suivra)
"Narratives of Catastrophe"
Newspaper headlines of recent years, detailing extreme weather events, the rising spectres of authoritarian movements and the surveillance state, not to mention the COVID-19 pandemic, describe conditions uncomfortably similar to those typically found in the dystopian novel. As one bookstore in Smalltown Canada put it, “the Apocalyptic Fiction section has now been moved to Current Affairs.”
E. M. Forster had something aesthetic in mind with that famous phrase, but it applies as well to more practical or material kinds of systems, networks, and patterns in American fiction, from the whaling industry in Moby-Dick (and the Pequod as metonym for that industry) to the various networks - transportation, financial, criminal, political, logistical, electronic - explored in the work of writers like Frank Norris, Philip K. Dick, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, William Vollmann, and Jonathan Bayliss.
The poet's lyric "I" is perhaps the locus classicus for depictions of interiority, or what it feels like to inhabit a particular psyche, to experience a particular consciousness, but this roundtable will examine such depictions in American fiction. Authors might include Jonathan Bayliss, Annie Dillard, Henry James, Jack Kerouac, Ralph Ellison, Kathy Acker, Henry Miller, William Faulkner, or others.
The Jonathan Bayliss Society invites proposals of no more than 200 words, along with a brief bio, for consideration for a roundtable at the American Literature Association, May 26-29, 2022, Chicago. Please send proposals to Gary Grieve-Carlson at grieveca@lvc.edu by January 25, 2022.
In Episode 9 of James Joyce's Ulysses, “Scylla and Charybdis,” Stephen Dedalus develops a theory about the origins of Shakespeare’s works that is both original and controversial. It is in the National Library of Ireland that Dedalus, in a wild and winding conversation, develops his ‘Hamlet theory’. The episode stages the strong and sometimes comic appeal of a biographical approach to Shakespeare’s works and, at the same time, casts Dedalus – Joyce’s alter ego – variously as Hamlet, Hamlet’s father, Shakespeare, and as a modern-day Ulysses.